Nick Douglas

The Mercury News ran yet another story this weekend about the "Green Revolution" — basically, the rise of high-profile Silicon Valley investments in clean-fuel technology.

The usual names are named — the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kleiner Perkins VCs John Doerr and Vinod Khosla. Missing are the Google co-founders and a few other players. But anyway, why do these players suddenly want to throw green at Green?

Green looks sexy. This year, Al Gore managed to turn a PowerpointApple Keynote (thanks, reader Jordan!) lecture into two hours of entertainment. That's as sexy as environmentalism will get, post-Greenpeace.

Green gets government money. Congress may finally put decent money toward clean-fuel efforts. And government contracts turn green into gold. (Note: When writing about environmentalism, journalists are required to use every possible "green" cliche.)

Green doesn't have to be too green. Plenty of investors, including Khosla, are betting on ethanol as the fuel of the future. Thing is, some say ethanol is just as crooked a game as oil, and it's only a temporary fix. There's nothing a good tech mogul loves like planned obsolescence.